Caption: Tornado damage. Landscape and trees damaged by a tornado. A tornado consists of a violently rotating column of air below a thunder cloud. On a local scale, a tornado is the most destructive of all weather phenomena. The rotating air has a speed well over 160 km/h (speeds of 480 km/h have been recorded). The width of the destructive path is normally the same as the width of the funnel at the cloud base, typically a few hundred metres. The tornado moves along with its parent cloud, its path length may exceed 100 kilometres. Photographed in New South Wales, Australia